Refugees' Roles in Resolving Displacement and Building Peace

Beyond Beneficiaries

Megan Bradley, James Milner, Blair Peruniak, Megan Bradley, James Milner, Blair Peruniak

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781626166752, 9781626166745
• eBook ISBN: 9781626166769
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Immigration Law
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How are refugee crises solved? This has become an urgent question as global displacement rates continue to climb, and refugee situations now persist for years if not decades. The resolution of displacement and the conflicts that force refugees from their homes is often explained as a top-down process led and controlled by governments and international organizations. This book takes a different approach. Through contributions from scholars working in politics, anthropology, law, sociology and philosophy, and a wide range of case studies, it explores the diverse ways in which refugees themselves interpret, create and pursue solutions to their plight. It investigates the empirical and normative significance of refugees’ engagement as agents in these processes, and their implications for research, policy and practice. This book speaks both to academic debates and to the broader community of peacebuilding, humanitarian and human rights scholars concerned with the nature and dynamics of agency in contentious political contexts, and identifies insights that can inform policy and practice.

Part 1

Refugees and
Resolution Processes

Disciplinary Perspectives

1

Durable Solutions and the
Political Action of Refugees

Karen Jacobsen

Integrating the issue of displacement into peace processes has been widely called for by scholars and peacemaking agencies (Koser 2007; Harpviken 2008; Kälin 2015), who believe that resolving displacement can significantly contribute to achieving a lasting peace and that the return of internally displaced persons (IDPs) and refugees is a sign of a successful peace process.¹ Similarly, the active involvement of refugees and IDPs both in peace processes and in forging their own solutions to displacement is seen as an important ingredient to resolving protracted situations by those who advocate for the “politics of presence” (Phillips 1995). Given the numbers of displaced people in and from conflict-affected countries, their involvement—including as spoilers—in peace processes is an important piece of the problem (Stedman 1997; Milner 2011). Refugees’ involvement in peace processes points to their broader political activities, particularly in countries of first asylum, where their activities and motivations are diverse, complex, and riven with contradictory and competing interests, including their interests in peace and other political processes such as repatriation and resettlement (Krznaric 1997). As Rex Brynen suggests, “forced exile frequently implies a broader context of war, foreign occupation, dictatorship and resistance, or civil strife—circumstances in which refugees may be both victims and participants. As a result, strong political or national grievances may exist, sustaining in turn high levels of mass politicization” (Brynen 1990). This politicization is not always aligned with the preferences of aid agencies and host governments, particularly when it comes to so-called durable solutions of repatriation, local integration, or third-country resettlement. As in the 1980s, with the Eritrean repatriation from Sudan, today it is still the case that “donor-managed repatriations, coordinated as they are by governments and associations of governments, are not always in concert with, nor reflective of, the desires of refugees themselves” (Hendrie 1991). In sum, refugees’ political aspirations and grievances can make it difficult to conflate the goals of peace and formal displacement resolution processes. To date, refugees and peacebuilding programs have not been systematically linked in policy and practice, and “the prolonged presence of refugees in neighboring countries poses both challenges and opportunities for peacebuilding in the country of origin” (Milner 2011, 1).

This chapter contributes to theory building about refugee political action by exploring the forms of refugee political engagement that take place beyond arenas of formal consultation and institutionalized processes. A large body of scholarship focuses on refugee militarization (Lischer 2000; Muggah 2006; Harpviken 2008; Lebson 2013), and there are plentiful examples, including Afghan refugees in Pakistan; the Rwandan Patriotic Front in Uganda; Darfur rebel groups in Chad and elsewhere.² However, our understanding of how and why displaced people engage in nonmilitarized forms of political action—often at great risk to themselves—is less well studied. In an effort to broaden and supplement our understanding of refugee militarization as a form of political action, this chapter provides a typology of nonarmed political action by refugee individuals or groups. Nonarmed political action includes all forms of direct engagement—activities in which refugees have “skin in the game”—that is, they are willing to contribute their own time and resources and to confront the risks that often come with political action. It also includes more strategic forms of political action, such as the mobilization of nonrefugee advocacy groups like religious organizations and engagement by the refugee diaspora to pressure host countries (Van Hear 1998; Betts and Jones 2016). By focusing on nonarmed political action, the chapter expands our analytical understanding of the categories and costs of political action by refugees.

The chapter focuses on the largest subset of the global refugee population—those in developing countries of first asylum, that is, the low- and middle-income countries that are not members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, where 86 percent of the world’s refugees live (UNHCR 2015).³ The chapter focuses particularly on Africa, where “the problem of protracted refugee problems has assumed the most serious dimensions” (Slaughter and Crisp 2009), but also considers the highly illustrative case of Guatemalan refugees in Mexico in the 1990s.⁴ In most countries of first asylum, the government admits refugees under some form of temporary protection, either as prima facie refugees or under some other temporary status. This status generally means refugees are excluded from formal political institutions and the political rights that come with citizenship; thus, few refugees are able to participate in their host country’s formal political systems.⁵ Nonetheless, refugees do engage in a wide range of political action, as this chapter explores.

The research and literature on the political mobilization and action of refugees is well established, particularly concerning diasporas and refugees in North America and Europe (van Bochove and Rusinovic 2008; Wald 2008; Lindley 2009), in keeping with a general bias in migration research toward studies of destination countries and of immigrants within receiving nations (Beauchemin 2014). However, studies of refugee political action in countries of first asylum are relatively scant. Most research on refugees in countries of first asylum focuses on refugees’ socioeconomic experiences and livelihood strategies (Zetter and Ruaudel 2016; Bellamy et al. 2017). Existing scholarship on how and why refugees get involved in political processes; how political engagement differs for men and women; what their diverse interests, strategies, and tactics are; and how the structural and contextual factors constrain their ability to mobilize and organize tends to be regionally or case-study based.⁶ Efforts to theorize more generally are still emerging.⁷ Much of this literature is located in the humanitarian discourse of crisis and emergency response, where refugees’ action is often described in terms of “coping strategies.”⁸ Andrea Purdeková’s critique of this scholarship argues for moving “beyond a crisis-centric, humanitarian perspective to understand the longer-term political dimensions underpinning people’s decisions to move or stay” (2016, 1). Other recent scholarship, particularly by scholars of urban societies in Africa, has challenged this humanitarian discourse and sought to place the actions of refugees in a wider political context.⁹

The Goals of Refugee Political Action

Refugee political action is similar to the political action of other migrants in that the goals are broadly related to the host (asylum) or home (origin) countries (Østergaard Nielsen 2003) or to mobility within and between host and home countries. Four categories of political goals are described below: immigrant politics (focused on the host country), homeland politics (focused on the home country), self-government, and mobility politics. These categories are shaped into a typology of migrant political action. The typology is intended as a heuristic framework that can help organize the literature and serve as a basis for more systematic and comparative research.

Immigrant politics are political actions undertaken by immigrants and refugees to improve their situation in the host country, including to obtain political, social, and economic rights or to fight against maltreatment and discrimination. There is substantial scholarship on this topic covering immigrant politics in destination countries (Givens and Maxwell 2012; Rubio-Marin 2000; Schulz 2003; Zapata-Barrero et al. 2013) but less research in transit countries and countries of first asylum (as further discussed below), except when it comes to Palestinians (Brynen 1990; Schulz 2003; Doraï 2010). In these countries, refugees’ political goals are aimed at securing increased assistance, the right to work, access to documentation, and so forth, and to ameliorating poverty. An important goal is the right to freedom of movement or mobility, including the right to resist being relocated (e.g., sent back to camps). Immigrant/refugee political action aimed at the host country is motivated by the desire to pursue livelihoods and education for their children and by grievances about treatment by host government authorities, the public, or international humanitarian agencies. This grievous treatment can include inadequate food, education, shelter, and other services as well as harassment, discrimination, and other issues related to dignity. The targets of political action include the national host government, local authorities or civil society, and aid agencies, particularly the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which, as the international organization mandated to protect refugees, is seen by refugees as bearing the responsibility for their welfare.

Homeland politics are the political actions of immigrants, including the so-called the diaspora channel (Burgess 2014), that seek to oppose or support the political regime in the origin country. Immigrant actions can be aimed at the homeland regime itself or at its foreign policy or other policies including return movements and treatment of returnees. In countries of first asylum, one type of refugee political action aimed at home countries is the formation of and recruitment to “refugee warrior” groups aimed at overthrowing the home country government. As discussed above, this area is fairly well studied, and this chapter focuses on more peaceful (but not necessarily less risky) forms of political action. Refugees also engage in peacemaking processes and seek to shape the postconflict political situation in the homeland through influencing processes of repatriation: “Refugees . . . may use the repatriation process as an opportunity to renegotiate their relationship with their state of origin by asserting their rights claims and challenging the state’s prerogative in deciding which citizens can participate in the political community of the state” (Bradley 2014, 117).

A third type of political action by refugees and immigrants concerns self-government, in which refugees organize themselves through elections and the formation of self-governance bodies in order to manage the affairs of their community.¹⁰ These activities include dispensing community justice (da Costa 2006), developing self-help organizations such as schools for children, or pressuring UNHCR or the host government for services. Another reason for self-government can be that nationalist movements embedded in the refugee population get “a chance to practice the forms of governance and social organisation they would establish following independence,” as is the case in the Polisario Front–controlled camps of Western Sahara (Mundy 2007). This development of a “state in exile” is more likely where refugees have been in protracted situations, that is, where their stay in a country of first asylum has been longer than three years (Crawford et al. 2015).

An important cross-cutting theme concerns mobility, including between host and home countries and within the host country. For refugees, freedom of movement can mean security (to escape threats) and livelihoods (to find work or education or to conduct trade) (Horst and Nur 2016). But refugees also resist imposed movement, such as when the host government or UN-HCR tries to encourage relocation (e.g., to camps) or repatriation in the interests of “durable solutions.” Resistance to being relocated within the host country or to being repatriated is a long-standing theme in refugee protest. In 1976 representatives of Ethiopian refugees from the Wad El Heleiw camp in Sudan sent several petitions to UNHCR to protest the decision of the Sudanese authorities to transfer them to camps further from the border with Ethiopia (Karadawi 1999, 121).¹¹

Forms of Refugee Political Participation

In pursuing their political goals, refugees engage in both conventional and nonconventional forms of political action. Conventional forms of political participation include voting in or standing for elections; promoting referenda; participating in advisory councils and arenas of dialogue; joining political parties, pressure groups, and political organizations; lobbying activities; attending political meetings; and generally contributing time and money for political activities (Zapata-Barrero et al. 2013). Conventional forms of political participation are the prerogative of refugees with permanent residence and citizenship. These include those few (less than 1 percent of the world’s refugees) who have been resettled in third countries (such as the US or Canada) or those who have been given citizenship in first-asylum countries (such as Burundian refugees in Tanzania; Milner 2014a; Kuch 2016). However, refugees with temporary status who lack formal political rights nevertheless engage in conventional forms of participation such as elections, as described below.

Nonconventional and extraparliamentary forms of political participation include protests, demonstrations, sit-ins, political strikes, hunger strikes, civil disobedience, and boycotts. These forms of political participation often involve greater risk, especially for refugees and immigrants who lack documentation and are in a “legal limbo”; the lack of documents increases a refugee’s exposure to the authorities of the host country (Kihato 2011).

Table 1.1 outlines a typology of the goals and types of direct political action by refugees. The typology is not definitive; it is intended as an analytical tool to think about the political action of forced migrants. The rest of this chapter explores this typology in selected camp and noncamp settings to see whether the type of settlement influences political activity.

The Difference an Encampment Policy Makes

Countries of first asylum can be divided into those where the government tries to impose encampment policies and those where the government permits refugees to live among the host population. In countries with encampment policies, the government requires refugees to live in formal camps and seeks to make the international humanitarian community provide most of the assistance (and local communities provide the land). Globally in 2015, there were 196 countries hosting refugees (UNHCR 2015).¹² Of the 108 countries hosting more than 1,000 refugees, 36 (36 percent) countries required refugees to live in camps, with African countries having encampment policies more often than other regions.¹³ However, in most countries with encampment policies, not all (or even most) refugees live in camps, and those who do tend to move in and out of the camps on a regular basis (Jansen 2015).¹⁴ For example, in 2017 Jordan hosted over 656,000 registered Syrian refugees, of whom 21 percent lived in three refugee camps and the rest lived in Jordan’s urban settings.¹⁵

In countries without encampment policies, refugees live among the host population, from whom they rent or share housing and land. Especially in the Middle East, many refugees move into towns or informal settlements adjacent to towns. These informal settlements can resemble camps, but they fall outside designated UN-administered and government-recognized official camps and are neglected by the UN, the state, aid agencies, and (for Palestinians) even the Palestinian Authority. For example, many Palestinians—and increasingly many Syrian refugees—live in informal tented settlements in Jordan and Lebanon.¹⁶

Whether refugees live in camps, informal settlements, or among the host population is an important dimension of refugees’ political life. Type of settlement is potentially both an enabler and disabler of political action, providing opportunities for action (for example, access to social capital and resource mobilization) and imposing constraints. Some scholars suggest that, because of the “exceptional” status of camp life, the political actions of refugees in camps are unusual or “experimental” (Turner 2015; Lecadet 2016). Another argument, however, is that camp politics is simply a form of “normal” politics—that is, actions designed to attain a purpose through the use of political power or political channels—except that the power dynamics in camps are different, so the targets of political action differ too.¹⁷ Long-standing (protracted) refugee camps are increasingly seen and studied as places where forms of governance and justice, order and organization, emerge over time (da Costa 2006; McConnachie 2014; Holzer 2015).

Table 1.1A Typology of Refugee Political Action

Goals of Political Action	Forms of Political Mobilization
(directed at)	Conventional	Nonconventional
Self-Governance: Managing refugee affairs (community justice)	Participating in elections and run...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Conclusion
• References
• List of Contributors
• Index